Cell phone based money transfer systems such as M-PESA provide a facility for transferring funds between mobile users. Cash may be exchanged for electronic money, which may be sent to family and friends, to pay bills or to purchase mobile air-time, for example. Such systems are designed to work on limited functionality mobile handsets using an installed SIM toolkit to provide additional menus dedicated to funds transfer, USSD sessions or interactive voice response (IVR) systems. SMS messages may be used to confirm to a sender and a receiver that an amount has been transferred following a transaction or payment. Cash may be redeemed or exchanged for electronic money (or “e-money”) at outlets, which may be grocery stores or air-time resellers, for example.
An example of such a system is described at http://www.vodafone.com/start/about_vodafone/what_we_do/vmt.html.
Such money transfer systems are typically in use in countries with a limited banking infrastructure, where the population may not have access to basic financial services.
Such systems are gaining popularity with millions of transactions occurring daily. These transactions are monitored for the purposes of complying with anti-money laundering/counter terrorist financing requirements, but the aggregated data may not be analysed otherwise. Furthermore, aggregated transactions may not necessarily be analysed on a regional or national scale. Compliance with transaction monitoring, identification and verification of customers is an ongoing process in money transfer systems.
Therefore, there is required a system and method that overcomes these problems.